welcome to an unboxing of the first motherboard that I've seen from Gigabyte
that has more of a plain slick look to
the front of the box versus well we see back sort of more like the traditional
style on the back of the box where it's sort of marketing bullet points on every
square cm of the packaging so the front
very clean very nice so let's see what they still consider worthwhile to call
out on the front in spite of the dramatically reduced amount of text so
this is the x79 ud5 which is an x79
board and is sort of an upper upper to Mid tier board based on that they
usually have a UD something below that and usually a UD something above the
five patent pending 3D power three-way
digital engine so digital CPU power as well as digital memory power time two
interesting they also have their patent pending 3D BIOS so the 3D BIOS uh and
the 3D power utility are available for download and what this means is it's a
very unique way and I haven't seen it in person yet so I can't tell you too much
about it but it's a unique way that Gigabyte has implemented their ufi bio
so with previous Gigabyte boards there's z68 boards their p67 boards they've had
UEFI features like support for 3 terb plus hard drives but they haven't really
looked like a graphical like a gooey
BIOS like the ASUS ones and the MSI ones have well now they have a fully
graphical BIOS and I am really looking forward to checking it out let's see
what else they have to say for themselves so yeah this is an x79 board which means full support for Intel core
i7s on the LGA 2011 platform PCI Express
Gen 3 is dependent on CPU and expansion car compatibility but it is designed for
PCIe Gen 3 which means the switching is all correct for channel DDR3 you can
install up to eight dims so that's up to 64 gigs of memory with the dims that are
available today with a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi card included
on the back we find a whole lot more of Gigabyte whatnot so three-way digital
engine means digital memory digital CPU and digital memory so A and B mean
that's um that's uh the
sorry so this is quad Channel memory which means there are four channels and
then you can put up to two dims in each channel so this is going to probably be
doing one of the dims in each Channel
and this will be doing one of the dims in each of the other channels so that
way you have completely different Power delivery for each of the channels
although it's possible that they've done it for the banks on either side of the
memory controller due to the differences and interference for these Banks and
these Banks I'm not sure which way they've done it either way it means very Advanced power management on the
motherboard for your memory 3D power so this is to do with turbo voltage
response you can maintain optimal voltage with loadline calibration and
realtime pwm frequency switching so these are all features that are possible
with a digital pwm 3D power utility users can now enjoy a fully interactive
3D utility that facilitates adjustment of the three dimensions that control the
power delivery to your CPU and memory and voltage phase and frequency these
parameters are crucial okay 3D BIOS so this shows the board here I my
understanding is you can actually highlight certain sections of the board and be taken to the pertinent settings
for those sections so that's a very different way of doing things for sure
we see traditional Gigabyte features like dual BIOS with a switch allowing
you to pick between which one you want to boot from it also gives you a fail
safe in case something happens and it gets corrupted onboard power OC and
reset buttons up to eight slots for maximum capacity got it and Ultra
durable 3 which is their two times Coster copper PCB and high quality
components so let's get the actual board opened up I'm sorry that took so long
but here we go that is a very nice
looking board Gigabyte with their LGA um
1155 processors really took a major step
forward in terms of their board Aesthetics and now I'm seeing something actually
kind of new and that they're also taking a major step forward with their
accessory Aesthetics I remember seeing black PCB 3-way SLI ready boards that
came with these blue SLI Bridges check
this out matte black SLI Bridge there
you go that is how it is done so what
else we got in terms of accessories here we have a flexible 2-way SLI Bridge we
have a flexible black Crossfire Bridge
all of those are looking fine looking good we have a some kind of a cable for
plugging in something we'll find out what that's for later got a couple
antennas okay we have a front USB 3
brushed metal sort of looking it's probably brushed plastic but it looks
pretty good and then that's your uh internal header for USB 3 here aha this
is the uh the Bluetooth and what else is
on this thing I think it was a sticker on the front they excited to include
this so this is a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi
card very cool let's open this up so
those two antennas are for this guy so there's the Bluetooth one and the Wi-Fi
antennas and then uh let's see those are both hooked into the same module here
looks like there's a USB port on the back here or you can plug it in by front
USB which must be what that Cable's for there we go so this allows you to plug
it into the USB header on your motherboard and then you can have
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cool all right we got a user manual
including your driver's disc you should download the latest off the Gigabyte
website all that good stuff GC Wi-Fi
installation guide so here they're going to show you how to do it all right so
you plug the thing into the thing and then plug the other things into the
other thing and it's pretty straightforward pretty much what I already explained okay what else we got
multilingual installation guide book Gigabyte sticker to be home theater
sticker uh we got 1 2 3 four SATA cables
uh two are right angle and two are straight to straight and finally an IO
shield and then now see I lied before
I'm sorry you guys now the board itself
I'm just sort of going to make some room here make this a
platform and here we go so this is an LGA 2011 board which means full support
for as I said before core i7 core i7
extreme processors on the 2011 socket as
well as all the goodies that go along with it so so that starts with the quad
Channel memory controller so you would install banks in one two over here three
and four four channels of memory and then if you wanted to have eight dims
then you would afterwards populate the black ones the reason I would populate
the gray ones first is cuz you can see each of the closest gray ones is
slightly further away from the socket than the closest black ones which means
that you can install larger CPU coolers without interfering with your RAM good
thinking Gigabyte we appreciate those little details very very much speaking
of little details the 8 Pin power connector is at the top left of the
board in its exact right correct location where I like to see it and
moving over we've got our power delivery system so as with all x79 boards this is
packed into a very cramped space and I would definitely recommend throwing some
active cooling whether it's uh incidental air flow from your CPU Cooler
or whether you got a fan in your case above the board here in order to make
sure that that's getting enough cooling the power switch is in an intelligent
location up at the top right because a lot of the times you see them on the
very bottoms of the boards and as soon as you install a couple graphics cards
you know here and here they're covered and you can't access them anyway so our
24 pins in its correct location along the right hand Edge we've got our front
USB 3 header and what I'm going to start calling the correct location along the
right hand Edge because that's where things plug into the front we've got 10
uh SATA ports of some sort or another so
these guys are SATA 3 6 GB second these are SATA 2 3 GB per second and these
four are SATA 3 6 GB per second as well
so we've got a nice little heat sink on our chipset there we've got our reset
switch we've got our front panel headers clear seos jumper as well as our dual
biosis right here moving over we've got our powered or like super powered USB
port for charging things like iPads and other tablets uh we've got two more
front USB 2.0 ports we have fire wire in
case anyone still using is that we've got our front audio and now let's have a
look at the PCIe slot layout so we've only got six PCI slots which means that
uh I mean I mean look at look at how much space they would have had to put a
seventh one up there with these memory slots right here there's just not a lot
of space on these x79 boards so a lot of guys are putting six slots on so the one
here is PCIe 16x this one here is also
wired for 16x and this guy's wired for 8X which means you're going to run 16x
16x for dual cards or eight or 16 88 for
triple cards we've also got two PCI e1x
slots and one Legacy PCI slot in case you still uh need you know like an old
Wi-Fi card or sound card or whatever the case may be let's go ahead and have a
look at the back of the board where we find oh cool look at that you can select
which uh BIOS you're going to use with a button on the back that's outstanding
you can also clear the seimos here and you have your One Touch over clocking
button here this is this is actually a great inclusion to have on the back of
the board this is one of the most multicolored back panels I think I've seen in quite a while and we're back to
the like check check this out this looks great you got like black and gray and
like gunmetal and blue you know a couple
blue accents and then here it's like back to the circus which is what
Gigabyte motherboards used to used to kind of look like all over them but I
don't mind it on the back as long as the color coding sort of makes sense so we
got our PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports we got one two three four five
six seven eight USB 2.0 ports we have an
ESAT Port so that's a USB 2.0 as well as an ESAT Port we have a straight eata
Port so that's 2 e sat we have two USB 3.0 fire wire gigabit Ethernet and
finally 7.1 audio out including an optical audio out so thank you for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the G x79 ud5 don't forget the
supports all the latest goodies including Crossfire SLI socket 2011 quad
Channel memory PCI Express 3.0 and even
Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi and all of that
is completely out of the box